The following is my next column for the The Buffalo Gap News (Texas). Subscriptions for this monthly paper are $60 a year: subscriptions@buffalogapnews.com
Each summer when I was a youngster in the 1960’s I visited my grandparents in northern Minnesota. They were humble farmers who still had a working outhouse. Yes they had indoor plumbing (installed about 1960), but I guess old habits died hard: despite the times, the outhouse remained. I recall it was a single-stall unit with a simple wooden bench and a round hole with a mysterious dark pit beneath. Since there was only one bathroom in Grandma and Grandpa’s house, at some point everyone used that single-stall outhouse.
Perhaps the leaders of my city, San Francisco, are becoming nostalgic for the good old days? I say this because their latest brainstorm is to demand that businesses and city buildings employ single-stall restrooms.
Why? For privacy you may wonder?
No. This kooky plan is to allow the City by the Bay to enter the new frontier: bathrooms for all genders—all 58 of them.
I know most of you are now recalling that 6th grade science class where you learned about the two genders, male and female, as designated by the XX and XY chromosomes. Silly you! These are the days of Bruce Caitlyn Jenner. The city of San Francisco believes there are 58 different genders including:
Bigender (a person who fluctuates between traditionally “woman” and “man” gender-based behavior and identities, identifying with both genders)
Genderqueer (a label often used by people who do not identify with the binary of man/woman)
Pansexual (a person who experiences sexual, romantic, physical, and/or spiritual attraction for members of all gender identities/expressions)
Thus to accommodate these 58 varieties (particularly the likes of the three noted above), businesses and city buildings would be required to make single-stall restrooms available to all of them under legislation introduced by Supervisor David Campos.
The measure requires businesses with single-stall restrooms to make sure that at least one is available to everyone on the gender spectrum, not just males and females.
“Equal rights and equal access should apply to restrooms just like everywhere else,” said Supervisor Mark Farrell, who is co-sponsoring the legislation.
I can only imagine what the stick figure signs identifying these restrooms will look like.
Looking back Grandpa and Grandma were way ahead of their time.